Eurydice Walks Behind
by FurLicker
Summary: Stormtrooper on Starkiller after the destruction of the Hosnian System. Very short one-shot.


(slightly AU in the sense that I'm allowing for conventional enlistment, also I'd forgotten how compressed the movie timeline is, so this piece assumes a bit more time between the destruction of the Hosnian System and the destruction of Starkiller Base)

 **Content Advisory: death, suicide**

* * *

Something changed after the Hosnian System went dark. Something beneath the surface, you could sense it, in the canteens, in the barracks blocks, it felt like the air after a firefight, crackling and tense, as if a current had passed through it.

You couldn't escape talk of it, even if you wanted to. It possessed all of us. It was big, bigger than anything we'd imagined, bigger than we were able to entirely comprehend. You could tell some were excited by it. They thrilled to the power of the display. It made them feel strong. But in a eager, childish way as if they'd just come off an especially impressive run on the simulator, and their talk was all of noise and fire and distance and trajectory, not of consequences.

What were consequences to them? What was the Hosnian System to them? To any of us? Many of us knew almost nothing of it save its name and alignment. We knew it as Enemy. As Other. It was beyond the pale, and thus irrelevant. When it came to combat, I think we all, to varying degrees, chose to believe this. It was a way to survive, to stay sane. But this wasn't combat.

The wise among us accepted that the die had been cast; they made their choices and they lived with them. They knew that the only way out, the only way to survive, was to keep their eyes fixed firmly ahead. They never looked back. Not even for a second.

But most of us were not wise. We were little more than children, though we thought ourselves stone-aged veterans. What we did to the Hosnian System made us feel strong, powerful, but it did not make us feel safe. It should have, but it did not. We had a soldier's instinct for such things. And we did not know what to do with this uncertainty, with the simple truth which confronted us: that it was possible to back a winner and still have chosen wrong. It disturbed us, it threatened to take away the power and agency we thought we possessed, it raised questions which we did not want to know the answers to. It frightened us. And so we resisted it, we denied it. We comforted ourselves with our sameness - conflating it with rightness - with our strength, and with the doctrines which had been poured into our heads for years. We kept our eyes forward; we had seen a glimpse of what lay behind, out of the corners of our eyes we had seen the flickering of its shadow, but we dared not turn and face it.

All except Atli. Atli looked back. And look where it got him. An accident. That's what the CO called it. But she didn't find the body.

I did. It was late morning and I was coming off back-to-back watches in the hangar. I just wanted to sleep. But there was little chance of that. Then or since. Atli saw to that.

I could smell it even before I reached the bunk: ozone and piss and burning hair. He was lying on his bunk, the one above mine. His eyes were wide open, and there was a charred hole in the side of his head, like a third eye, gaping up at the ceiling. He'd never said a word. Not to me. And we'd grown up together, enlisted together, escaped that hell hole of a mining depot together. I should have known, but I didn't. He never said a word.

I can still smell it. In the middle of the night I wake up and I can still smell the piss and the burnt hair, though they've taken away all his things, even the mattress. And I can still feel him lying up there, his eyes wide open, all three of them.

The days aren't much better. Every time there's a breathing space, a spare moment, he's there. Just behind me. Daring me to turn. But I won't. I'm not weak. Not like him. That's what I tell myself. I tell myself he was a coward, I tell myself he was soft. I want to hate him. But I knew Atli, I knew him better than anyone, and I know he was neither of those things.

Sometimes I think of my grandfather's stories, about kings and shaft boys and self-fulfilling prophesies. And I wonder if things aren't the other way round. But my grandfather choked to death at the bottom of a pit, like all his fathers before him. I'm not like him. And I'm not like Atli. I'm not a coward.

That's what I tell myself, but I don't know. If I'm honest, it is not courage which keeps my eyes fixed ahead, keeps me from looking back. When I wake in the night with my face wet and the smell of death pressing over my nose and mouth like a gag, I know what it was that Atli saw. And I know that I don't have the strength to face it.


End file.
